Breathe

Rick Bettua should be dead. Many times over. The retired US Navy master diver suffered a devastating attack by a 12-foot bull shark that shredded his thigh from his knee to his hip. By the time he reached the shore 90 minutes later, he’d bled out, he had no pulse, and wasn’t breathing. Yet, emergency medical workers didn’t give up. His miraculous recovery in late 2020 was just the most recent of his numerous underwater life-and-death experiences.

Breathe is Rick Bettua’s survival/adventure story. It’s also a story about perseverance against great odds, and his impressive skills to solve problems—and even save lives—under extreme conditions. It begins and ends with the shark attack and his recovery that defied the odds.

In between are 15 other stories in which Bettua narrowly escaped death during his remarkable 32-year Navy career. In one instance, in a search for a lost piece of a ship’s propeller, he was buried alive 70 feet below the surface and under 20 feet of mud when a tunnel collapsed. When he finally worked his way free after two hours, he then completed the task, so no other divers would be endangered.

The first-person narration takes the listener through Rick Bettua’s evolution as a diver from a kid spear-fishing to one of the elite Navy master divers. He never wasted time to achieve a goal. He started spearfishing when he was just 10 years old, then entered the Navy when he was 17.

Because he loved diving and it was also his hobby, he moved ahead rapidly in his career. He became a master diver only one year after becoming a chief petty officer. He achieved the highest rank possible for an enlisted sailor, master chief, at age 33, one of the youngest ever to attain that rank.

But Bettua’s promotions never kept him out of the water—or out of perilous circumstances. His skills, his fearlessness, and his perseverance helped him survive time and time again throughout his career and beyond it.